EVENTS

Temporarily suspending Empowered Health coverage

So I have been, happily, let down by the Vancouver Sun. I was relatively sure that their “Empowered Health” series was going to be chock full of ample fodder for my skeptical scalpel, but so far it is simply “diet and exercise” repeated ad infinitum, mixed with a few exercises in lazy journalism. As a result, I am going to suspend my weekly examination of the stories, since it makes for boring blogging (and I’m sure boring reading too).

Comments

That’s Canada for you: sensible to the point of boring. Or not, as the post below shows…Just to point out, diet and exercise are not panaceas for health problems. I’ve seen any number of patients with nasty illnesses who asked me, “How could this happen to me? I eat right, exercise regularly, and have never smoked.” The answer, unfortunately, is that your BRCA mutation or factor V leiden don’t care if you did everything “right”, they’re still going to give you cancer or thrombosis. Good health habits reduce your risk of various problems, but they aren’t perfect preventative measures.

Absolutely not panaceas, but at a population level they lower your risk greatly. This is the difference between how an MD thinks and how an epidemiologist thinks. “Individuals? What are those? You mean datapoints?”